Scottish Girls About Town by Jenny Colgan

Author:Jenny Colgan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2003-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

A former translator, TV presenter and staff writer for the Daily Mail and Scotland on Sunday, LENNOX MORRISON now writes full-time. She is the author of a highly successful debut novel, Re-inventing Tara, and her second novel, Second Chance Tuesday, will be published in early 2004.

Born in Elgin, Lennox grew up in Galloway and Aberdeen, and now lives in Glasgow.

The Crunch

Carol Anne Davis

“W rite about where you’re going on holiday,” Miss Barrie says on the last day of term.

The half of the class whom she calls the Worker Bees get out their jotters and start writing but the Drones have mostly lost theirs and have to get pieces of paper. I’m in the row that’s between the workers and the Drones ’cause Miss Barrie says I could go either way.

I get out my jotter and smooth back the anaglypta-papered cover. I write the same thing at the start of every summer: This year we are going a day here and there.

I was five and a half, half the age I am now, when Mum first said to tell the teacher we were going a day here and there. She said it was what people did when they didn’t feel the need for a proper holiday. So I came off school for a whole seven weeks and Mum said every day that I could take my wee brother Mark downstairs to play on the washing green providing we didn’t touch anyone’s washing or let Mark fall off the wall.

One morning, just as we were getting ready to go downstairs and walk the wall, the doorbell rang. The three of us jumped and Mum said that the place was a midden as usual and to throw everything behind the cushions. Mark started to put his cereal bowl behind the cushions but I stopped him because I knew what she meant.

I had just finished putting all her darning, the People’s Friend and Woman’s Weekly in the sideboard when she came back into the living room holding a square machine. “Look what Mr. Elder gave us.” We looked and looked until she added, “It’s his old record player as thanks for looking after his mum.” Mr. Elder’s mum had something wrong with her which made grown-ups whisper and my mum had popped downstairs to see her every morning for ages as the creaking door aye hings.

We asked Mum if we could have a record and she said wait-till-your-dad’s-in-a-good-mood-then-ask-him so three months later we still didn’t have a record. Mum sang “It’s A Man’s World” and “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me” and “The Green Green Grass Of Home” all afternoon after they’d been on the transistor but she only knew a few of the words.

I already knew lots of words from my first year at school and was trying to learn more from the People’s Friend when Mum wasn’t reading it. She passed her copy on to Aunt Mina every Saturday, running down the stairs to meet her as she walked past our house on her way to work.

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